Julian Casablancas Is Riding Forth To Rescue Rock. Again.

Ex-Stroke is looser, artsier, and funkier.

The world first met Julian Casablancas at the turn of the millennium. He was greeted as one of the best new hopes for rock & roll, which had for the past few years been suffering from flagging momentum after the alt-rock boom, growing moribund and full of terrible rap-rock bands, and quickly losing relevancy to hip-hop and pop. The Strokes – along with a handful of scrappy "The" bands like the White Stripes and the Vines--gave rock a new center of gravity and a spark that they passed on to scores of other bands that came up in their wake.

Nearly 13 years after Is This It, rock is in an even worse place. It has almost entirely disappeared from the Hot 100, apart from a few shmaltzy, adult-oriented acts like OneRepublic and the Neighbourhood, and its underground has grown increasingly fixated on sounds from the past at the expense of innovation. A generation raised on hip-hop and EDM have started to see guitars as hokey and outdated. If rock was on life support in 2001, now it's got a priest posted up bedside ready to administer last rites.

Casablancas's set at the Fader Fort at SXSW on Saturday night suggested that if he's not exactly prepared to pick up the mantle of rock's savior again, he can at least offer some assistance to the effort, with a scuzzy backing band called the Voidz and a set of new material that finds him once again breathing new life into rock out of what at times appears to be pure obstinance.

Compared to the Strokes' stripped-down, coked-up minimalism, his new stuff is positively proggy, embellished with synthesizers, funky bass lines, and at one point a looping melody played on a thumb piano. He's letting the Voidz off the leash in a way he never allowed the Strokes--the drummer pounded away at his kit with Keith Moon-like recklessness and the lead guitarist was given plenty of room to show off a style that managed to balance 80s hard rock shredding and 90s noise. The songs themselves are a world away from the Tom-Petty-meets-Television approach of his Strokes material, mashing together disparate influences with the manic abandon of late-period Clash. With so many recent rock bands carefully emulating the style's past successes, Casablancas' rediscovery of its power to surprise is vital.

But was it good? That's hard to say. The Voidz played as loose as they did loud, and the set was littered with flubbed notes and missed cues. Then again, that's pretty rock & roll. And if Casablancas isn't summoning the razor-sharp, preternaturally hooky melodies of his Strokes days anymore, his deepening interest in textures and growing talent for tricky compositions--the way he can set one guitar part against the other to generate the sonic equivalent of a moiré pattern--almost makes up for it. At times the set was a sloppy mess, but a lively one. Coming away from it you get the impression that Casablancas is on a mission to prove not only that he's still relevant, but so is the entire genre he's working in, and he's attacking it with zealous fervor. And against all odds he seems to be succeeding.

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